Is Free Speech Worth Defending? Blazingcatfur Fundraiser

Dec.3,2010

“Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.”

Dean Steacy, one of the CHRC’s lead investigators

The statement above, which comes from the Human Rights Commission, should resolve the free speech issue in Canada once and for all. After all, they are the ultimate arbiter on that issue. However, there are few annoying little bugs, who refuse to be subjugated by the Commission’s wisdom. One of them is the blogger Blazingcatfur, who is currently sued by a “prominent Canadian lawyer” for expressing his views. On December 1 JDL-Canada organized a Chanukah party to raise money for his defense.

So maybe we should ask: is it that important to spend money to fight the case? Wouldn’t it had been easier if he just stopped publishing his blog?

The short answer is that defending what he is doing is vitally important to all of us.

To give a detailed answer, I should begin with the statement that the current situation in Canada is strikingly similar to the situation in the communist countries in the 1980’s. Although freedom of speech was written down as an inalienable right in the Constitution of the country where I came from, in reality it didn’t exist.

There were no censors and theoretically you could publish anything you want. However, if anything even remotely deviated from the Party line, it was reported immediately (everybody had the duty to do so). That put into motion the scary government machine. Those were not the Stalin’s times, so nobody got shot, but the magazine or the book with the offending material were confiscated and destroyed and everybody involved in the publication was either fired or demoted. In addition, you could lose some of the socialist “perks”: they could strike you out of the 10-year government waiting list for the coveted Lada (“the best car of the socialist camp”). And you could forget about that trip to Czechoslovakia, because the police would deny your application for “international passport supplement” (trips to the “semi-capitalist” Yugoslavia and the rotten West were out of the question).

This whole madness was supervised by graduates of the Academy for Social Sciences and Social Management. Behind that bombastic name was hidden a quasi-university generously financed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which provided free lodging, free food and salaries to the students, who were recruited mostly from the local Party cadres with an added number of Arab and African terrorists. The curriculum was strictly Marxist, but the most important thing was that the graduates had the supreme ideological authority over the politically unstable physicists, chemists, other scientists and common folk.

The system they created seemed to be iron-clad and indestructible. Its main product was fear.

The fear that if you stand against the system you can lose all that I mentioned above, allowed semi-literate Party functionaries to put into practice mad social experiments, which contradicted even the most basic economic laws. The scientists were afraid to discuss any significant issues and many of them chose the safe way of confirming the Party line, which didn’t bring any benefit. Of course, there were few dissidents who dared to speak, but they couldn’t make the masses overcome the fear. Eventually, the whole system collapsed under the weight of its own irrationality and inefficiency.

Do you see the similarities? Fear is mass-produced in Canada as well. You can publish anything, but better make sure it doesn’t contradict the myth of the multicultural paradise (symbolized by the posters showing people of statistically-correct different colours laughing for no apparent reason, which you can see in the waiting rooms of the Canadian embassies around the world). If you go against that, the punishment will drop on you faster than a Monty Python 16-ton weight.

I am not aware if Blazingcatfur is on any Lada waiting list or if he is planning to go to the now defunct Czechoslovakia, but he is being sued for $500,000, which is punishment enough. That is more sophisticated than the communist methods, because for communists dragging you through courts was an unnecessary nuisance.

Just like the case with the Party Academy, many of those producers of fear are graduates from weird programs like gender studies, conflict resolution or social sciences (from far left perspective). Since they are not qualified to get any meaningful job (without re-training), they fill the positions at the government agencies and commissions for social control. It is a disturbing trend here and in Western Europe that more and more students choose those subjects, instead of real science.

And those people, who have no idea how the economy or the real world work, have the power to tell others what they should or should not think.

The scariest thing about them is that they have no sense of humour. In my old country, telling a political joke was considered “anti-Party propaganda” punishable with fine and up to 8 months of jail. Here, Ezra Levant was dragged through the HRC system for years incurring legal expenses of over $100,000 for publishing cartoons of a certain desert war lord. Do you see any difference?

The same people are trying to convince us… no, they are trying to force us to believe that a certain desert religious system, which has brought only misery wherever it has been practiced, or some voodoo culture of no importance have exactly the same value as the Judeo-Christian culture that had made Canada a prosperous country. Yes, that’s probably true in the parallel multicultural universe that the social activists inhabit, but it is pure insanity from the point of view of any ordinary person with a real job.

However, there is a modest ray of light in our situation. You see, under communism the semi-literate Party Academy graduates controlled everything. In Canada, the social activists haven’t reached that stage, although they very much want to do so in the name of defending the “vulnerable” moochers and looters. There are still private businesses and people who work for them. If Blazingcatfur lived in a communist country, his cause would have been hopeless, but in Canada it is still possible to promote the truth, because we still have a system, in which the majority of people can vote out somebody if he or she doesn’t defend them.

That’s why it is so important to support people like Blazingcatfur.

After establishing the fact that a Cat with blazing fur has the right to live (up to the limit set by the Fire Marshall’s Office), let’s see what happened at the fundraiser.

First of all, a very large number of people showed up. Sorry, there will be no pictures of them or else they will become the target of the pro-Muslim crusaders.

The event opened with few words from Meir Weinstein, JDL-Canada’s Director. He talked about how Chanukah started with the Maccabean rebellion in response to the Greek desecration of the Jewish Temple. The Maccabees had to cleanse and rededicate the temple. Upon reopening the temple, there was oil to let the light burn for only one day, but miraculously, the light kept burning for eight days. This is the message of Chanukah, to survive and recover against all odds, just like when Israel recovered the desecrated by Arabs Jewish holy sites after Judea and Samaria were reclaimed during the Six-Day War.

Meir Weinstein

The same message applies in the current situation – Blazingcatfur is accused unfairly and we should not let our enemies take away our rights to speak. That’s not an isolated incident, in Europe anti-Semitism is at its all-time high after World War II.

After that Meir lit the menorah and introduced Joseph C. Ben-Ami from the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies.

Joseph C. Ben-Ami

Joseph Ben-Ami pointed out how bad it is to persecute somebody like Blazingcatfur, who has done nothing wrong. He speaks the truth and is on the side of freedom and liberty, which are the bedrock of our civilization. It will be a catastrophe if we lose them. Without liberty, we will not differ from our enemies. Our enemies can have many faces – Marxist, Islamist, etc., but all of them share one feature – they want to establish a government that would fully control people’s lives.

The methods they use to achieve that goal might be subtle and their arguments seductive, but the final purpose is the same government control. The totalitarian tendency in Canada is strong, because we have lost our idea about why we are free. This is especially true about Islam, whose followers want to make us be exactly like them by using and abusing our institutions of democracy.

When courts and other institutions are used to subdue democracy, that’s really bad. For that very reason it is important to support Blazingcatfur and his wife Kathie. They are great friends of Israel and liberty and their fight is a fight for all of us.

The next speaker was Kathie Shaidle, who revealed a shocking fact. When she met Blazingcatfur in 1998, not only didn’t he own a computer, but he also didn’t know how to use one. So she was the reason for the creation of that character. The latest case was not his first clash with people who were trying to silence him; he has been assaulted physically before. On somewhat pessimistic note she observed that now in Toronto there are twice as many Muslims as Jews, so the politicians will adjust their behaviour accordingly.

Then Meir Weinstein spoke again about how we should never forget about our enemies who are all out there. He recalled a case when he was in Israel years ago – terrorists massacred yeshiva students in Hebron and the Arabs in the area celebrated, dancing and giving away sweets. We shouldn’t hesitate to oppose such people. George Galloway’s recent visit to Toronto is an example – he is a supporter of terrorism, yet the Islamic Society in York honoured him with dinner and the place was packed. The problem is really serious – that Society is considered “moderate” although they hold every year commemorative services for Khomeini.

The Left goes out of its way to support such people. In the latest drive to finance a boat to Gaza, they try to get around the Hamas statements that they want to destroy the Jews by interpreting them simply as hostility toward Zionists. The Nazis went after the Jews to distract people’s attention from their much more sinister plans. This time the things are not different, those groups target not only the Jews, but our civilization as well. We need to build a world-wide alliance of similar minded people to confront the danger.

Next spoke Blazingcatfur himself. From his words it became clear that there was not much to celebrate about the free speech in Canada. The “prominent Canadian lawyer” who is after him has 60 other lawsuits against other people pending. The Canadian Human Rights Commission refused to prosecute an anti-semitic Montreal Imam because in the commission’s worldview Muslims sit
at the top of their victim hiearchy. The reason for that is the Marxist background of the bureaucrats, who work there, they always see Muslims as “victims”. For example, B’nai Brith suffered for five years at the hands of such kangaroo court in Manitoba. Even the Jewish Defense League was targeted by the “prominent Canadian lawyer” for showing Geert Wilders’s film Fitna and he even tried to do get the support of the Canadian Jewish Congress to do that.

The whole issue with those hate speech laws is that eventually they will be used against Jews and anybody who thinks differently. Now Geert Wilders is charged in the Netherlands under those laws. At the same time, extremist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood are left to do their propaganda undisturbed, going against us through a “soft” jihad. Even foundations supported by people like Kaddafi can freely operate in Canada.

Yes, there is not much to celebrate, which gets me back to the initial point. If we don’t defend our values and let our reason sleep, we will end up exactly like communism – by allowing our civilization to collapse. However, there is a substantial difference between the two: when the communism collapsed, something better came to replace it and now most of those countries are more prosperous than before. If we let the Islamists take over we all will be cast into the “outer darkness… where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth”. The world as we know it will be over.